On Tuesday 30 March 1847, five days before his departure for the United States, Frederick Douglass addressed several hundred distinguished guests at a soirée organised in his honour at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate Street. The London Morning Advertiser reported that ‘Very many elegantly dressed ladies graced the scene with their presence, and, in addition to an excellent band stationed in the gallery, Mr. Henry Russell was engaged, and sang the “Slave Ships,” and several others of his exquisite American songs.’

On the platform beside Douglass were a number of leading Garrisonians including the chairman George Thompson, John Estlin, William Howitt and W. H. Ashurst, as well as rival abolitionists aligned with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, such as Thomas Binney and its founder Joseph Sturge. Also present was Rungo Bapojee, the agent of Pratap Singh, the deposed Maharaja of Satara, for whose reinstatement Thompson had (as his official ambassador in London on a salary of £1,200 per annum) campaigned – unsuccessfully – for a number of years. A number of invited notables – Charles Dickens among them – sent their apologies.

Thompson called the meeting to order and after several introductory remarks from some of his friends and supporters, Douglass had the floor. He told his audience that he was not returning to a country he admired – it was a place where slavery was vigorously upheld by the constitution, aided and abetted by the Northerners who sent fugitives back to their masters, and unapologetically defended by the churches. He paid tribute to the courageous abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison, ‘the foremost, strongest, and mightiest among those who have completely identified with the negroes in the United States’. He went on:

He reminded his listeners that for his ‘uncompromising hostility to slavery’, Garrison had faced opprobrium not only in the United States, but also in ‘this country’.